Anyone have a link to download the game? It sounds pretty awesome; just a couple of days ago, I was trying to work through a four-dimensional thought experiment (in particular, convincing myself that the locus of points in R4 located X units from point A and Y units from point B is a sphere, so long as none of X, Y, or the distance from A to B are as large as the other two added together), and had to be guided through seeing how it worked. Our brains aren't meant to handle this stuff.

Flatland is pretty good...it's a Victorian satire where those shapes with the most sides are higher up in society, and women are just lines. When a sphere comes to visit the square and explain 3D, he's all confused, but once he gets it (by visiting 1D and 0D), he decides to spread the word, which gets him locked away.

Ethliel wrote:I'm assuming the "lesbian orgy" thing is some reference to what different types of people look like in flatland and the shape of a stick person's body? I really need to read that book...

In Flatland, women are lines. So the lines composing a typical xkcd stick figure...well, it's unlikely a priest (which would be a circle, or more properly a polygon with too many sides to feasibly count) would stand by in approval.

Ethliel wrote:I'm assuming the "lesbian orgy" thing is some reference to what different types of people look like in flatland and the shape of a stick person's body? I really need to read that book...

Basically, social rank is based on how many lines a polygon has. Women are line segments, low-class males are isosceles triangles, then equlateral triangles, and so on. The priests have so many sides that they are considered circles.

So a lesbian orgy overseen by a priest would be a bunch of lines topped by a circle.

Ethliel wrote:I'm assuming the "lesbian orgy" thing is some reference to what different types of people look like in flatland and the shape of a stick person's body? I really need to read that book...

In Flatland, women are lines. So the lines composing a typical xkcd stick figure...well, it's unlikely a priest (which would be a circle, or more properly a polygon with too many sides to feasibly count) would stand by in approval.

OOOhhhh. Now it makes sense. I can't believe that went over my head.

Omegaton wrote:I haven't ever read Flatland... I really want to try out this Miegakure game though!

I think I'm one of the few art majors to ever read Flatland! It was on my dad's bookshelf, and he wasn't much of a math person either. I'm actually quite surprised there have been no A. Square or other Flatland references until now! I think Flatland is like a primordial xkcd, the original math nerd's satire!

This comic made me so happy today... Not just because I've loved Flatland for years, but because Randall came to a convention this weekend and during a discussion he put up a version of this comic as one he said he would never put online. I love how he found a great (and even better) way to do it anyway!

You went to PAX? And you were by the Miegakure booth?? And I didn't see you??? I must have played that game two hours total over the course of the weekend, so much fun and so much brain hurting. I was the guy in the foam/plush viking hat.

My high school comp sci teacher had a sequel pastiche on his desk for an entire semester. I read it ten minutes at a time before classes. Now I think it was bait to figure out which kids were logically intuitive, to push them a little harder.

You could give Adanaxis a shot. It's found here. Too bad if you have windows or mac, then it's just a demo for you (unless you pay), for those on open source there is a full free version (though stripped of "commercial audio and video effects"). It's a fun space sort of shooter in which you have to aim in three axes (zenith, azimuth, and what you could call dw/dt), and thus can travel in four dimensions. It uses some colouring and target circles to indicate the target's place in W.

Very cool, I too played Miegakure at PAX East, limited myself to a few levels since there were a lot of people interested. I'm looking forward to be able to buy it one day, I heard Marc give an estimate of "next year". I may have to write my own 4D platformer before then to satisfy myself...

Carl Sagan references and explains why the squares in flatland have such a hard time understanding 3d, and we humans understanding anything beyond three... and he does so in an awesome way, after all, he is Carl Sagan! I attached the youtubey goodness.

Dewdney's planiverse is a good follow-up to Flatland. His 2D world has gravity (so the directions are forward, backward, up and down), and he actually considers some 2D physics issues.

I don't think it's treated in the planiverse book, but in a 2D world, I suppose gravity would be inversely proportional to distance rather than distance squared (as the radius of a circle is proportional to its circumference, whereas the radius of a sphere is proportional to the square of its surface). Now I'm not a physicist, and I'm too lazy to make a simulation, but I think I've heard somewhere that you can't get stable orbits with gravity inversely proportional to distance. So you couldn't have a planet orbiting a sun... anyone got an idea what a 2D universe might look like?